Friday, February 17, 2012

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 61

Leading off with the sad news, this week, of the untimely death of Christian Ide Hintze, poetic and multi-media experimentalist and founder and director of the remarkable Schule fur Dichter (Vienna Poetry School). Here's the obituary notice (in German) in derStandard. Here's another local (Viennese) report. Pierre Joris, on his always admirable Nomadics blog, quotes Anne Waldman's fond remembrance of him - "I remember Ide's visit to the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in the 1980's with other brilliant poets and thinkers, [fellow Austrian poets] Christian Loidl and Christina Huber, how (he) sat at the feet of Allen Ginsberg to receive "transmission" for his work and creation..." (the full text of her memorial note, alongside footage of Hintze in performance, may be viewed and perused here).

His 1995 Naropa lecture on the founding of the school can be read here.

His "poe:tik revolu:son" (poetic revolution) - for Allen (alongside Sappho, most probably, his favorite poet?), we featured a few months back - "One subject between us is this sense of messianic poetic revolution.."

We'll have more on it next week, but Feb. 23rd (as part of the Tune-in Music Festival) is the world premiere of Bill Frisell (or rather, Hal Willner)'s "Kaddish" - a "multi-media extravaganza" (based on the poem), produced by Willner, and featuring him and director Chloe Webb reading the text, short films by Webb, art by Ralph Steadman, and a unique original score by Frisell.

And a heads-up - opening March 30, Alan Govenar's feature-length documentary, "The Beat Hotel" - "1957. The Latin Quarter, Paris. A cheap no-name hotel at 9 rue Git le Coeur became a haven for a new breed of artists fleeing the conformity and censorship of America. The hotel soon turned into an epicenter of Beat writing that produced some of the most important works of the Beat Generation..". We'll have more on that in the coming weeks too.